Techno Tim HomeLab and NEW Server Room Tour! (Late 2021)

well here it is you asked for it again and so i'm showing it again can you believe it's been over a year since my first home lab tour i've upgraded servers consolidated servers gotten rid of servers and even added some raspberry pi's and i've also revamped my entire networking and consolidated quite a bit but it's also grown too i've added new services which required new hardware and even moved everything into its own dedicated room and before i moved it into that room i had to revamp the entire thing and again like my first tour i've been putting this off until it was ready but like i said last year home labs are never ready or done they're always evolving and always continuing to grow so while i wanted to wait until this was more ready i figured now is the best time to do it plus it's getting close to the end of 2021 and so without further ado here's my late 2021 home lab server tour uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay first up is this whole entire room this room was nothing more than a hole in the wall with some storage the previous owner marked it as sauna but it seemed more like a grow room to me over the last few weeks i transformed it into my server room or data center this is all diy except for the window so don't judge me on the mudding and taping some of it was there already and well i'm a tech guy and before we get started on the whole thing the first up was this smoke alarm so i already have nest fire and co2 monitors in my home so i figured adding another one in here would be a good idea considering i have a lot of electrical equipment in here and yeah so this smoke alarm right in the kids room press to test well they didn't have a preset for server room so i figured this was close enough so if you didn't notice when you enter this room the lights turn on automatically that's because of this hue switch here and this hue sensor up here and so i have some automation on philips hue that when it detects motion it'll automatically turn on the lights so if i walk in here the light should turn on automatically so i've gone all out here too on philips hue in automation i know that philips hue lights are pretty pricey but i've been slowly building them up over time and the automation and integration i get really can't be matched i have two hue iris smart lights over here and they're controllable too and then i have a phillips hue light that i put inside of my rack and really i just nudged it way down in there looped it over here and put it down there now it doesn't give off a ton of lights when the lights are on but when the lights are off it gives off just enough and then i also have a philips hue light bulb inside of here and all of that can be controlled from this hue light switch right here now i can take this off or put it on it's magnetized but i can press the button to change the color temperature or turn them on and off or the color temp and also the brightness this also changes them on the rack and these iris lights as well and if you're wondering how i automated all of these lights with motion i have a hue motion detection up here the cool thing about this is too is that it has a thermometer inside so i can monitor the temperature of this whole entire room from this sensor as well and so this along with my hue hub gives me access to that data anywhere on my network so i've been able to combine this temperature sensor and motion sensor along with the hue hub and along with some code i wrote to automate some pretty cool stuff on my raspberry pi so i can monitor the temperature in here now of this whole entire server room and then possibly react on it if i like now right now it's just printing it out to an led screen in my office but in the future i could automate pumping heat out of here or pumping the heat back into the house to keep it warm but for now i haven't done any of this so i have until the summer of next year to figure that out so enough with the lights let's talk about what's on the wall if you remember from the first tour i had a bunch of stuff detached to the wall just to make it easier to get to and to keep it off the ground and for better cable management well i considered putting everything in my rack again but i found that it would have to either put up a ton of shelves or print out a ton of custom things just to get all of this inside of my server rack so i decided i didn't want to go down that route also i wanted to have a wall that gave me more flexibility than plywood and screws i wanted a more industrial and modern pegboard and so i found these these are the wall control 30p galvanized steel pegboards and i couldn't be happier with them these wall boards gave me a ton of options for attaching things that are oddly shaped it also gave me a ton of flexibility for adding pegs and hanging other things in the future now i used some standoffs and some wing nuts so you can get behind it and i think that turned out pretty good so let's start from the top and work our way down so i have all of my cords coming through that hole over there that was the only way to get them in here and fortunately that hole was already there but but i kind of had to rig some stuff up to make it look nice well a lot nicer than it did before but i have this cable management sleeve that i just put on there i'm not sure if i'm going to keep it but this cable management sleeve kind of hides some of the wires and so all of these wires come down into this chip light patch panel now i only have 12 ports but that's good enough for me and i didn't add any actually during this upgrade and i know it says cat5e up there and i do run cat5e but that still gives me gigabit ethernet so i still have the same isp and i still have the same fiber motor and i still have the same speed 300 up 300 down i could pay more for more but i don't use anywhere close to 300 up 300 down but they're bumping me to 500 up 500 down come 2022 and raising the cost of the lowest price package which is what i have so i'll be getting half a gig up half a gig down here in a couple of months so if we follow this down we talked about the philips hue but this is my philips hue hub it controls 20 to 30 devices in my home it's fantastic the reason why i always go with philips hue is because they actually have a really nice api too that i can write code against so that's how i automate all the lights in my office and even the temperature regulation in the future in here and so to the left is my raspberry pi this one is poe powered from my switch this one does a little bit more than the other one it's running nut server to control and manage all my ups's i have three plugged into it and it monitors and coordinates shutdowns for most of my servers it's also running a second instance of traffic and is my load balance proxy so that if one goes down this one takes over it's quickly becoming my junk drawer pi server for quite a few things but more to come on that so next up we'll just go down here is my unifi flex mini i don't know if you've seen these but these are pretty awesome so this flex mini is actually a layer 2 switch and it's poe powered so this ethernet coming in is poe powered it powers this whole entire switch and then gives me layer 2 networking so why would i want layer 2 networking here well i get vlans so a lot of these devices are on different vlans and this was an easy way to give me vlans on this wall i actually have some of these sprinkled around the home too behind two of my tvs i had them for all the different devices and so i run poe here then i get layer two switching and then i can assign vlans to them so it's pretty awesome and like i mentioned since it's on poe powered it's also on backup power too but we'll talk about that here in a second so next up is my hd home run so the hd home run is a network tuner i have a coax cable here that runs all the way up to the attic the last owner was kind enough to leave a huge antenna suspended in the attic and a coax cable coming all the way to the basement it's like they knew i was going to put an hd home run tuner down here so all i had to do was snake this over to here and plug it in and so then this is again on a vlan but connects to this mini switch here um and this is how i record all of my pbs and all of my other tv and so this then connects to plex and that's how i consume my media okay to the left is my old intel nook so this one is it's actually pretty old this used to be my media center believe it or not used to run windows media center i think eight right when they took it off eight but then gave it back to you for free or something like that i'm not sure but this used to be my windows media center and then for a while it was just a test device and when i bought it i bought one that actually had a cpu that supported virtualization so this has an i5 in there that supports virtualization and i had the idea to install proxmox on it and it actually runs flawlessly so i have two virtual machines running inside of here both of them are kubernetes nodes and they're both virtualized within proxmox so i did that so i could have a low-powered version of both proxmox and kubernetes in case something happens and also it helps establish quorum with proxmox although even though i had two nodes before i never had a problem it's nice to know that this one will win in a tiebreaker scenario but more to come on low-powered proxmox okay to the left is my pi zero so this is the same pi zero i talked about before it's still doing the same task just pinging my servers trying to wake them up if they're down with poe packets or wake on lamp packets or magic packets and then rebooting itself and trying that over and over again so it's still doing that but it also picked up another task so this is actually my low powered dns server too this is running pi hole so the reason why i have yet another pi hole server a third one is just in case i reboot or power down all of the servers in here this one will still provide dns and so this one is actually load balanced with my other dns servers and i'll have something coming on that soon but what that gives me with all of these devices is a low powered solution in case i have to shut this whole entire rack down which can be the case if the power goes out because the ups that's down there doesn't last too long but we'll talk about that here in a second so following all of these wires down is one of my ups's so this is the apc 850v battery backup this is consumer grade and actually works out really really well so this ups alone can power this whole entire wall for about two and a half hours if the power were to go down and it's not like i'd need two and a half hours of power but this wall doesn't draw that much power but in the case that i i do it's there and if it were off that long i would probably shut some of this down and conserve this battery and charge my phones and other devices but that's it for this wall so this wall over here is pretty blank now originally i only bought two of these panels but then the feng shui was kind of off with only two of these panels because i had two over here and a blank wall so i decided to duplicate this other wall and create another one which doubled the work i needed to do but i think it turned out pretty good so on this wall is just this cloud lamp that i thought was kind of nice and gives some light but really this wall is open for whatever i want to do because this is a pegboard i can attach any pegboard attachments and hook up anything i want to this wall but i think eventually i'm just going to connect some batteries and things like that and have this just be a big charging station i don't know i don't want too many things on the wall but at the same time i don't want them on floors or shelves either so next up is something simple but necessary and that's these power strips now these power strips are fantastic these are extra 12 outlet power strips and they're wall mountable and as you can see they help deliver power to everything that's on the wall so these are really fantastic and heavy duty and relatively cheap and they were just the right size to fit underneath two of these pegboards and so once i got one again feng shui was a little bit off and my ocd kicked in so i got another one which is actually kind of nice because then i don't have to dangle and snake cords from this pegboard all the way over to here and as you can see that's quickly filling up but yeah kind of boring but definitely essential and i actually like these quite a bit heavy duty okay and real quick i do have a camera down here as you can see but i haven't found the best place for it yet it was kind of hanging out up here but right as i started recording i tripped on the cord and it fell down so i have no idea if it still works i hope it does uh so i tucked it in here but anyways the point is is that i'm going to mount this camera somewhere in here so that i have some video security in here too okay so now for my server rack so i'm still using the sysrax 18u four post rack that i couldn't be happier with this rack is built like a tank and houses everything i need i have some plans for this rack if you have a four post rack or something similar so be sure you're subscribed to see what i'm gonna be up to but let's start from the top down first is this ups on a shelf now i know this isn't the greatest place for ups but i needed to mount it somewhere and i didn't want to mount it on the wall this switch though is dedicated to my udm pro and my network switch this gives me almost two and a half hours of run time which is fantastic so if the power goes out both my udm and my switch pro will have power and the cool thing about that is is that i have lots of poe devices so that includes cameras mini switches access points and even some raspberry pi's and it's yet another reason why i went all in with a poe switch this will keep everything running for quite a bit of time if the power's out for more than an hour it's most likely gonna be off longer so i can shut things down to conserve some power and yeah i haven't found the best place for this yet so i just mounted it up there but just know it's gonna be somewhere a little more permanent in the future so first is my patch panel this is the detroit pack inco 24 port patch panel i use it because it's much easier to patch in ethernet cables than to punch down all 24 plus it lets me connect longer cables if i need to move this around in the future and these are the same cables that i used before the slim cat6 cables which have this translucent kind of boot on them which i think is really nice a lot of people warned me about these smaller cables and how they might catch on fire but i haven't had any fires yet and they've been working out fantastic i haven't had one die they work great and if there is a fire i have that to warn me so anyways good looking out but they've been working out just great and so most of these are attached to my 24 port poe gen 2 switch now this is a unifi switch as you can tell and this is the usw pro and so all 24 ports of these are poe powered you know if i could do it over again i would have gotten 48 because as you can see i don't have much space left if any most of these lights are turned on but i do have one or two free that i can swap around but if i had 48 i'd never have to worry about that but 16 of these are pue plus and eight are poe plus plus so that gives me some flexibility to power different things and this switch powers and connects every device in my home albeit summer attached to flex minis but this is my core switch for my home but yeah like i mentioned if i could do it all over again i would have gotten a 48 but maybe in the future in a future upgrade video so then this switch is uplinked through a 10 gig sfp plus port to my udm pro now this is not a gen 2 this is the gen 1 but it's my udm pro so this runs unifi network and network protect so unifi network has given me security features on my gateway as well as on my lan it's giving me threat management d-pack and inspection vpn and wi-fi ai now that's just a bunch of marketing for automatically tuning and adjusting my access points based on interference but it's nice that that does that and it also gives me a 10 gig port for wan but i'm not using it as you can see right there and also since the last video i started using unify protect as my home security system you can see the hard drive light that's in there that's flashing now i was a long time blue iris user and don't get me wrong it's a fine product i probably used it for almost a decade but with most of my network i wanted something that was a little more integrated and also i wanted to manage my cameras settings firmware all in one place and have on-prem object detection and use as little power as possible while keeping it all here at home on premise so unified checked all these boxes and plus i was already in with unifi networks so moving to cameras was just the next logical step for me now i know it's polarizing and again i love blue iris but i made the switch and uh for now this is working out pretty good so next up is my cisco sg18 18 port gigabit switch now you can see nothing's plugged into there i retired this a while ago and i found that this was probably the best place to store it plus it looks a little nicer than a blank panel but i'm getting rid of it soon so i've just been storing it here so next up is my pair of super micro servers so these are super micro bare bones 1u servers these are one new servers that run all of my virtual servers both are running proxmox and one has my video card pass through to it the one on the top for encoding on my gpu and one has my hba controller pass through to it to run truenets and the lights just went out because of motion detection there we go well motion detection works but these servers have half a terabyte of ddr4 in them combined so that's 256 gigs each and these run all of my virtual machines and run them very fast if you want to see the full build on the server check out my 1u upgrade video i talk about that and everything that's inside of there and nothing's changed i haven't touched or added a single thing since then actually i doubled the ram but i mentioned i might do that in that video and then did it a week later but yeah 100 the same and they're working great so right below this is my pc conversion server it still has the laser beam light you don't want to look directly in that because it'll blind you but i converted this pc a long time ago using a chenbro server case so this server used to run proxmox along with a few vms and had my gpus in it but since then i've repurposed it to a plain old ubuntu server with a large zfs pool so this does local backups of almost everything on my network and keeps a local copy of it here just in case i need to restore it rather than restore everything from the cloud i scheduled to boot up at night and then shut down about 30 minutes later i use sync thing to sync most of my data to it and i've thought about using trunas but i might have something coming in the future to replace it so i haven't done that yet but really this is just a second copy of my data that's on-prem that i can restore if i need to so below this is my disk shelf so this is the same disk shelf i bought on ebay about a year ago i was lucky enough to snag one before chia farming became a thing because after that sellers were charging 5x when i paid for it i still have six eight terabyte iron wolf drives in here and the raid z2 and i have one ssd in here for cash although i don't think i have it configured properly but it's there now this is connected to an hba controller over an odd sas mini cable that connects to my one use server up here that is virtualizing truenets so not much has changed there i am quickly running out of space but i'm gonna figure out something to do with all this youtube archival footage that i don't really need i think the figuring out what i'm gonna do is just delete it and not save it anymore and only save the final render or maybe save some b-roll but haven't figured that out so below that is my trip lite ups so this ups powers everything in the server rack except for my network equipment and unfortunately it'll only run for about 10 minutes which doesn't give me a ton of time but it does give me about five or six minutes to decide if i'm going to shut down all of my servers so this is what the nut server up there over here is going to coordinate and then it will turn them back on when the power comes back on so that final step is what i need to do and if you noticed in my nut server video that i have that tutorial video talks about this specific problem is i want to turn this server back on when the power's back on and so what's next well as i just mentioned i do have some plans i have some plans for some more storage servers some plans for networking some plans for things on the wall and a lot more automation and i have some plans for this rack itself physically how it looks and how it operates and i ask you the same thing what's next for you what's next for your home lab what's the next thing you're going to upgrade let me know in the comments section below and remember if you found anything in this video helpful don't forget to like and subscribe thanks for watching general is that a meta sweatshirt no it does look like it doesn't it this is not a meta sweatshirt no i do not do not work for facebook no this is a discord sweatshirt that's discord's fancy logo no it's a discord sweatshirt it's a discard right there i promise it's not a meta sweatshirt it don't work for facebook you can't fool me even if you change your name but yeah good call yeah it's funny when i saw their logo i'm like that's like a stretched out visual studio logo like they just stretched it and turned it just a tiny bit like an infinite loop you know which you know arguably the old vs code logo kind of look like that but it's basically like an infinite loop stretched i i don't know i don't know

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 166,944

Keywords: technotim, homelab, home lab, server rack, server room, server tour, homelab tour, home lab tour, homelab setup, unifi, supermicro, ups, 2021, 2022, udm pro, home server, home server build 2021, poe switch, how to build a homelab, who is technotim, technotim kubernetes, servers, networking, raspberry pi, studio tour, patch panel, disk shelf, homelabber, /homelab, cat6, tech wall, self hosted, network tour, homelab projects, home network rack, home server rack, home server setup

Id: u45Z4yGTgs8

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Coletrain66]

First!